This is more an exercise in characterization than a poem. If writ in prose, it would sound campy, and I hope it still does. For thousands of years, probably longer, rhetoric, prose, and poetry lived together in the same fine house. Delivery was what mattered, and flow—and perhaps, one’s table manners. Somewhere, I believe, they still cohabit.

I lurk
in shadowed
porticoes
in fear
my outcry splendid
in its firework
might reach
some ear, and
frozen by its
opposite,
that no sound
from my
orchestrated
anguish will be
heard—but if
it is…aah, if it is,
and if the Earth
brought to her
knees in dazzlement
by my fine argument
agreed to crack the
bones of those whose
tyranny I am so certain
of—what if they all,
of sudden, turned,
those men of might,
those women of
sagacity, and in
their final groveling
moments that they so
deserve they saw that
it was me who singled
out their villainy?

I would
be doomed.
I am already
doomed for having
wished the ones I
fear a ghastly end.
I bring ten-fold dark
curses on my head
and so I lurk…
and let you think
that I’m a jerk.

Superiority to fate
Is difficult to learn.
‘T is not conferred by any,
But possible to earn

A pittance at a time,
Until, to her surprise,
The soul with strict economy
Subsists till Paradise.

—Emily Dickinson (#1081)

~~~

“The art is not the person,”
says a writer I adore
as much for his career
as what he pens in crevices
between celebrity. It’s hard to take
oneself un-serious at every turn
and still enchant, and not keep
fan-slaves penned out back, whipped
to not admit your writing’s fit to burn.Superiority to fate is difficult to learn.

Today is garbage day, so I’ve thrown
out a metaphor gone saggy at the knees:
the one about reflections—I’m a mirror,
you’re a mirror, everywhere a mirror,
mirror—fairest, squarest, cock-a-doodle—
worst excuse there is for taciturn
refusal to let go of people,
places, memories that grind you down.
The healthy, gorgeous self discerns;‘tis not conferred by any, but possible to earn.

I knew this guy shortlisted
for a Pulitzer who spent his days,
not writing but elbowing those, like me,
who didn’t care much for his work.
He didn’t win; contracts dried up
and so did he—before my eyes,
from plum to prune he shriveled. Chasing
markets, dangling your pretty bits are yard sales
of the pseudo-soul that, masquerading, diesa pittance at a time, until to her surprise

she learns she never had to try
so hard, except—oh, damn!—the writer’s dead.
Your option, if you’re serious and not
just putzing for applause is to die alive
to expectation of the muddled kind. Pay full
attention to determination to feel better. Size
up that in words—begin, if need be, with,
Once upon a time… “True enough” will
fast become your truth. From shining eyesthe soul with strict economy subsists till Paradise.

~~~

I’ve borrowed a two stanza verse from Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) to write a glosa, a poetry form that first appeared in the courts of medieval Spain. Strictly speaking, glosas originate from quatrains, but Emily’s work is far too electric to fall nicely into brick-shaped lines. So, I rearranged her eight to four, allowing that she often wrote on envelopes and curved around into margins, and probably wouldn’t mind.

If the glosa form intrigues you, you can find a whole book of them written by my heteronym Alain C. Dexter, here.

A trapper of the northern
Cree once told me
of the history of man
to beast before the
bludgeoning of bison
and the westward plunge
of iron into grassy soil.

We were toilers, not
of land, he said, but
traplines marking
sacred routes that
twine the hunger of
the one along the other
blessed by Manitou
without the cringing
thoughts of deprivation
and of cruelty.

I was his only
audience, for most
who saw the pelts
laid out of fox and
lupine gray, the snares
and traps, on leathern
heels turned away.

He caught my eye.
You do not fear this
politic. I do. I’m also
curious. My father’s
father fed his family on
small creatures trapped.
Through winters harsh,
there was no other way.

Come closer, then.
An open ear is oft
inherited. His voice
was soft and rolling in
the manner of the
Nations who criss-
crossed this land,
preceding us.

He ran a finger, whisky
brown and mottled,
strong as maple burl
cross a map.

The trapline is a
mastered path through
skill and scent. Fine
balance keens the
resolute and wipes the
weaker clean. But this
is simple chemistry.

The bait that draws
the wolverine repels
the mink; the snow that
covers tracks partakes
as much in symmetry
of hunt as man. No agent
goes unnoticed, nor is
judgment passed, except
in final moments, so I’m
told, when trapper lies
in pools of blood or
doubt. Did I forget? Did
I not honour well the
prey that I am now?

In trapping, there’s
no enemy; the only
foe, distraction. Mind
you not, he warned,
what bait the others
lay. If it repels, the
stench obnoxious
seems, this is your
Nature saying, stay
away—and when the
fir cones or the petals
of a season’s end smell
sweet, then know your
heart is opening, and
drop all doubt to
follow them.

The crossing of our
paths, the Cree and me,
was long ago, and many
trails I’ve walked and traps
both laid and fallen into, yet
his words continue to
extinguish fear, illuminating
something that still shines.
I see him, now and then, at
play with fox and wolverine
in grasses deep that span
the fields of Manitou. Their
hunt exalted, never done,
they’re planning traplines
in the summer sun.

A bed of gilt
with posters soaring
to a vast and vaulted
ceiling lay dead
center in the room
where ghost of ages
had assigned me
for the night, and all
across the counterpane
(that’s bedspread, fyi,
for some of us) in red
and black embroidered
letters spelt, DO NOT,
DO NOT, DO NOT
SLEEP HERE.

Then where? If not
upon a bed of guilt…
I looked around, aware
that U had silently crept
in, laid low a golden
age, deposed a bower
of repose. For what?

God dang! I knew,
if nothing else, this wasn’t
new to me, this house,
a host stuck in some
marmelade of misery.
I had been happy
once, quite sure of it,
and fought hard every
day to drag the feeling
back to front ahead
of me and might have
too, except for U and I—

Eeks!

I thought I’d heard
a noise, some skittering
of clause along my toes.
I leaped onto the bed.
There was no other
furniture apart from
chains forged to the
wall with manacles
and shackles spiked
for hands and feet, a
sign between them
reading, YOU ARE MORE
THAN WELCOME ALWAYS
TO SLEEP HERE!

—the hell?

These were my choices
then: recline upon a bed
of gold that told me no,
or lock myself against
a wall that welcomed but
would never let me rest.
I pondered what the ghost
of ages would expect
from me, a tattered soul,
convinced that I am
battered by great
forces and that love
at best, is fiction
passing, restless…
and the more my
thoughts collided ‘gainst
the had and would
and could and should,
a headboard, iron, gold
I felt, perhaps from sheer
exhaustion, a relinquishing.

A gaslight near the window
winked and winked again—aha!—reminding me that
everywhere there’s two
there’s three, a thought,
unthought, and—

Off the bed I dove
and through the window
climbed and wondered,
tangled in the vines, if
what I’d viewed below
and thought I’d
dreamed was real.

In clear response, a
lion roared. A bull, he
pawed the flower bed
and snorted in circadian
disturbance—these are
not nocturnal creatures—
and the ghost of ages
woke me with a start
and said, you snored again, sweetheart.

“I did?”

No. That would
be a tawdry end
to think that all we’ve
been through was
a dream, for life is
not a dream, it is a
poem-song, a play
of rhyme and light
a slant, a metered
pause of U and I who
sometimes act, quite
needlessly, as though
we’re poor and
wandering.

Beware, for at the
crossroads of the habit
of self-sorrowing awaits
a ghost. His name
is Ages Past.

My guests, said
the ghost, ushering us
to a den with a view
of a city I knew from
my dreams with great
lions and bulls, bas-
relief on the walls.Help yourself to some
balls, they’re fresh roast
in a crystallized rum
with a cinnamon gum
that, when chewed while
aware, may offer the
sum of a notion of why
you are here, and not
caught in a jam made
of highways and rage
and thwarted desires
for cool, frothy beer.

The woman beside me
let out a shriek, for the
jam that he spoke of
writhed in a dish near
the balls with a wee silver
spoon, a thick reddish
gloop, it moved slowly
in circles of brake lights
and headlights and on-
ramps no bigger than
trimmings of nail that
rose up and fell and
they rose up and fell…

“There are no freaking
exits in this jam,”
said the man to whom I
supposed was his wife.

“Whoa-oh!” cried the
boy who had lowered
his ear to the jam while
munching a handful of
cinnamon balls. “You can
hear them all cursing!”

Indeed, said our host
with mellifluous tones,which just goes to show,
you may put on a front
to appear how you’d like
to be seen, but a place
true exists where we
store all the rest, for
whenever you wish to
draw from your past.

“And gum up the
present,” I ventured
at last and then cringed,
for the ghost whom
I’d hoped would forget
I was there cast his eye
on me now, and his smile
of filed teeth like a saw
to fell trees caused
an itch at my neck that
I didn’t dare scratch,
and those lunatic eyes,
neither waxing nor waning
but forever half, they
didn’t look through me,
they looked in between,
and whatever he saw
made his grin fall away.

We’ll be heading now
to your rooms, said
our host, and we all let
out sighs that assized our
particular moods from
excited to grim. I followed
the rest down a hall
and upstairs. In my
mind, I was holding a
space in the verb he had
used when the smile
dropped away—not
beheading, beheading,of course, I thought with
a timbre of courage, but
the itch it grew worse, and
I tried not to think of a toppling
yew, or how, when reversed
‘cross the ages of man, the
R and the E at the end of
my vibe when I fell would
reverb: T-I-M-B-E-RRRRRR!

A ghost of ages
never wholly past
plays host to holy
wanderers in rags,
invites us in to dine
amidst the din
of politics that rage
across the land
and says: Be welcome,
friends, to this abode
where quiet reigns
and future
ghosts await.

Leave your beliefs
outside the door.
I cannot stress this
overly, especially
those you claim to
not believe. The mud
of negativity occludes,
turns feet, then lips
and loin and finally the
mind to clay. Behold
these shelves!

We turn, a motley lot,
to look at niches
big enough to hold
a man. Among them
crouches one, though
handsome, he is nude
as if ashamed, and flaking.
Ghost of ages flicks a
chip of clay from off
the statue’s knee. This
man holds true to what
he’s lost—the zeros in
his bank account, the
light in his wife’s eyes,
and all he stands to gain
ignores, refuses coming
ease—the ease that many
like him push ahead and
call it death or paradise—
so now he squats in stalls
of grim philosophy,
decrying all that moves.

“He looks so alone,
poor thing,” I say.

The ghost of ages turns
to me. His irises are pearly
gray half moons that float
as if in mercury.

The dining room—
a chill creeps o’er my
bones—is this way.

We’re seated at a table
long enough to give
impressions of a rail
line that never ends.
I’m four seats from
the host and to his left.
Embarrassed by my
tattered lace, I hide
my sleeves beneath
a rich brocade of
gold and burgundy.

To be convinced
of poverty is bad
enough, the ghost
remarks. A woman
at his right looks up
and drops her spoon.
A spray of soup, of
rosemary and lamb
hangs in the air, a
fountain vascular
and fragrant that’s
forgotten, or is not
allowed to fall.

To pound at others
with a club of deprivation
when what you have
is this…

He spreads his arms
and all of us look down
the endless table heaped
with pyramids of fruit
and meat.

‘Tis meet that we
should gather here
this week that leads
to Hallowed Eve—

Somebody gasps.
I look around, and one
by one—how shall I put
this in a way that does
not terrify? Successive
blinks, yet all at once,
the chairs, once filled
with ordinary folk like
me, transform to seats
unoccupied until the only
beings in the room are
a woman, man and
child, host and me.

It was the summer of ’82 when my life fell apart, and I visited Grandma, sat on her porch in Hazelnut Corners, drinking iced tea and watching lightning bugs play catch-me-dare in the twilight.

“What’s that thing you fear, child?”

I was twenty-three, hardly a child, and hoped I made it clear in my response.

She cupped her ear and leaned forward on her squeaky porch swing. “The Reaper cussin’? That’s what scares you?”

“I said, repercussion, Grandma.”

“Well, hell, that’s just hogwash! There ain’t no repercussion, ain’t no Reaper cussin’, except the kind you place in front of your own self like banged-up paint cans to trip over and make a big howly whoop-dee-do for any poor soul who’s close enough to listen.”

I clinked the ice cubes in my tea and awaited what I knew was coming.

Grandma would never call herself a poet, though once she got a rhythm going, you could snap peas and shuck corn using half the energy and a quarter the time. Reverend Hicks said she’d have been a mighty preacher, if it weren’t for that holy injunction against women at a pulpit. But Grandma held no truck with thou-shalt-nots and given a pulpit, would have sent everyone home and turned the church into a B&B.

“Go make joyful noises,” she’d have said. “Let your kids bang pots, do some banging of your own. God knows some of you could use it.”

I wish now that I’d recorded her rune-songs while she was singing them, for rune-songs is what they were. Spontaneous, unbound, her incantations called down the Spirit and sent up her own, spinning out and growing the loop of creation her Creator began. Here, best as I remember, is what else Grandma said in her saucy way, that day we talked about the thing I feared.

Give yourself some
head room, child, grow
a house beside another
house becomes a village
with a garden, ‘nuff
to feed the crops of
young ones sprouting
tow and woolly heads
who chase each other
cross the gullies, nets
and footballs arcing
toward the sunset till
your mothers step
outside and call your
names to come indoors
where clean or rumpled
sheets await with dreams
pressed up like noses
to a candy store—it’s you
the world is looking for
the sweet and salty
liquorice taste of
smacking lips and tongue
your teeth and dreams need
spice to salivate and chew
bite down, enjoy the meats
that tempt while juices flow
let no one come between
you and the joy you’ve
come to sow, spit out
that thing you fear, it
winked out long ago
see for yourself
the lightning bugs
they’ll tell you so.

The following contains mild profanity and euphemisms. Reader discretion is advised.

—how would I write if All the Time in the World showed up, uninvited, and offered herself to me? Would I push her away, saying, “Sorry, no time”? Argue in defense of not enough?

This is why I don’t…
This is why I can’t…
This is why I haven’t…

Or would I truly hear her name, All the Time in the World? See her where she stands before me, berry-blushed and naked, legs apart, arms open, a smile playing on lips that make me want to…

Make me want to
Make me want to
Make me want to

…rush. Her lips, slightly open, and all the rest of her make me want to rush. The hammer of my accelerating heartbeat gives my urgency away, while the hair on my arms and other vital parts rise.

All the Time in the World moves closer. I can smell the sandalwood and cedar musk of her. A breeze picks up from somewhere to my left and lifts the corkscrew curls of her reddish-brown hair. The slope of her collarbone, a pair of apostrophes above two cherry pips on sundaes take me back to banana splits at Woolworths with Shirl Hedlock where I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, and then her family moved to West Chester, and I never saw the east-west chest of Shirl Hedlock again.

All the Time in the World wrapped her arms around me. I’m aware of being inconsistent in my tenses. Does she know I’m tense? Present, past and future are balling up in my head like the pungent rolling prize of a scarab. Maybe the hard-working dynastic bugs of old were trying to impress scarab pharaohs, Nefertiti queen beetles, competing for the biggest—shit! If I don’t get serious about my writing soon—

“No, no, no, screw serious! You’re doing fine.”

All the Time in the World pokes my sweaty diaphragm with a cocked finger, and I tip like a bowling pin, like a bottle of milk left on the porch in a sudden squall, onto the bed where I’d been lying and thinking and lying to myself, “I will never write again.” Now, All the Time in the World is lying on top of me, and while I’m having trouble remembering what comes after exhale, lush, ripe pomegranate prose starts pouring out…

~~~

Author’s Note: While debates with no hope of solution at their present level of thinking zing across the airwaves, dividing us in disillusioned heaps of politics, religion, sex and how we orient our sex, a fertility god walks the earth. His name is Tom Robbins. The American novelist, author of JitterbugPerfume and Skinny Legs and All, among others, navigates a fine, humourous, invigorating line between all of our insanities. For forty-plus years, Robbins has been penning phrases that are seemingly innocuous, setting them in scenarios so absurd you feel like you’ve found a piece of meteorite or the Meaning of Life. The phrase that got me sprinting to my keyboard this a.m. comes from Tom’s 1971 novel (his first) Another Roadside Attraction. “The uncomfortableness of associations” doesn’t sound like much, I know. As with all Robbins’s work, you have to be there—but only if you want to. In the tradition of the best gods and goddesses, he doesn’t seem to give a flying rip one way or the other.